Nope, many states and other countries have already adopted laws that make electronic "signatures" binding. Even if they haven't, in the US at least, it's very likely that a court would find that a digitally signed document is binding. The new legislation is intended to provide national uniformity in the United States, so the variances in the state laws (particularly California) will be irrelevant. Even without the new law, you can't get out of a contract by saying "Yes, I agreed to do that, but my agreement was manifested in electronic form, so too bad." You can get out of the contract (and will continue to have the ability to get out of the contract) if you can persuade the relevant arbiter that it wasn't you who entered into the agreement and your electronic "signature" must have been forged.
If you want to look at the new legislation, it's at http://www.house.gov/commerce.
Re:This only affects the *US*
on
UCITA is passed
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· Score: 1
This doesn't affect anybody yet. It's just a proposal which now goes to each of the 50 states and only takes effect if adopted by their legislature, and then only to contracts governed by the law of that state. For US residents, you can still oppose it in your state legislature. My SWAG is that it will eventually be adopted by 30 states, with significant variations in about 20 of those states, so there will be a complete mess. The interesting question is whether proprietary technology vendors start putting into their contracts that the contract is governed by the law of a state likely to adopt UCITA quickly (Washington maybe?)
If they build up a customer base there will be major advertising opportunities, but the main source of income is the float. PayPal charges your credit card, and they get access to that money almost right away and can invest it (possibly regulated to invest only in liquid securities like U.S. treasuries). Then they hope that the friend you paid leaves that value in their PayPal account for a long time out of inertia or the expectation that they'll use their account real soon.
Plus the Wired News article says they expect over time to get people to load their account by check or bank debit, so PayPal wouldn't have to pay those nasty credit card interchange fees.
Give PayPal credit for recognizing the market opportunity in peer-to-peer payments. If enough buzz develops, somebody will take the next step and commercialize real digital cash.
Until today, Register.com has been only an intermediary between you and NSI's registrar services. Now Register.com is itself a registrar, but still has to deal with NSI as the registry. That would be a great improvement if their dispute resolution requirements for domain name/trademark holder disputes are more reasonable than NSI's. Register.com doesn't make their User Agreement easy to find on their site, anyone know where it can be located?
For a longer article on the myth of the inferiority of the QWERTY keyboard (and lots of other good stuff on economics), see http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html.
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Nope, many states and other countries have already adopted laws that make electronic "signatures" binding. Even if they haven't, in the US at least, it's very likely that a court would find that a digitally signed document is binding. The new legislation is intended to provide national uniformity in the United States, so the variances in the state laws (particularly California) will be irrelevant. Even without the new law, you can't get out of a contract by saying "Yes, I agreed to do that, but my agreement was manifested in electronic form, so too bad." You can get out of the contract (and will continue to have the ability to get out of the contract) if you can persuade the relevant arbiter that it wasn't you who entered into the agreement and your electronic "signature" must have been forged.
If you want to look at the new legislation, it's at http://www.house.gov/commerce.
This doesn't affect anybody yet. It's just a proposal which now goes to each of the 50 states and only takes effect if adopted by their legislature, and then only to contracts governed by the law of that state. For US residents, you can still oppose it in your state legislature. My SWAG is that it will eventually be adopted by 30 states, with significant variations in about 20 of those states, so there will be a complete mess. The interesting question is whether proprietary technology vendors start putting into their contracts that the contract is governed by the law of a state likely to adopt UCITA quickly (Washington maybe?)
If they build up a customer base there will be major advertising opportunities, but the main source of income is the float. PayPal charges your credit card, and they get access to that money almost right away and can invest it (possibly regulated to invest only in liquid securities like U.S. treasuries). Then they hope that the friend you paid leaves that value in their PayPal account for a long time out of inertia or the expectation that they'll use their account real soon.
Plus the Wired News article says they expect over time to get people to load their account by check or bank debit, so PayPal wouldn't have to pay those nasty credit card interchange fees.
Give PayPal credit for recognizing the market opportunity in peer-to-peer payments. If enough buzz develops, somebody will take the next step and commercialize real digital cash.
Until today, Register.com has been only an intermediary between you and NSI's registrar services. Now Register.com is itself a registrar, but still has to deal with NSI as the registry. That would be a great improvement if their dispute resolution requirements for domain name/trademark holder disputes are more reasonable than NSI's. Register.com doesn't make their User Agreement easy to find on their site, anyone know where it can be located?
For a longer article on the myth of the inferiority of the QWERTY keyboard (and lots of other good stuff on economics), see http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html.